Moving to Monroe, WA

Monday, we moved to Thousand Trails Thunderbird, outside Monroe, WA. 

It is easy to think of states by their big cities, but even though we are as close as we're going to get to Seattle, this area of Washington still has quite a bit of farmland. Not as much cropland as we have previously seen in the eastern part of the state - more cattle and hay fields.

"Entering Farming Area, Please Drive Carefully"

We got to the campground -- this Thousand Trails is still a "first-come, first-served" campground. They have two distinct sections -- on the hill are full hookup sites in the trees, and across the road are water-electric sites next to the river. We still have our Starlink subscription active (through the end of September), so we want to have some sky view, but we decided to drive through the hill area to see if there happened to be any sites that had a possible north/west view for dishy to be able to access its satellites.

We only saw two sites open, and only one would fit Gracie, and it had a decent north/west view.

You can see the trees around on the side and back.

The trees are really tall!

Looking down the hill -- at the bottom of the hill is the county road that separates the "hill" part of the campground from the "river" part.

While walking around the campground, we saw this sign...

Here is the picture of the sign in its place -- if it is marking the parking for yurts, why are they "parked" *way* over there? Why aren't they parked in the yurt parking?!?!? (Yes, I know that it is marking the sign for where cars visiting the yurts should park, but... that's where my mind went when I saw the sign!)

After Sunday night ended up being a bust for northern lights viewing, we had decided we were just giving up on seeing them again... when our phones notified us that Monday night was a potentially good night for viewing from our current location! It was only predicting 10% possibility, but Carl went out to check...

There were some high clouds, he could still see stars, but no northern lights.

There was the added challenge of a nearly full moon, so not an ideal night for northern lights anyway. No success on viewing the northern lights yet again!